New Music Selected: Maharaja

Guess what, Interwebs?  Alfred Publishing selected three of my submissions for their 2011 String Orchestra catalog!  (I'm sure this news will be met with great elation by the approximately zero people who read this blog.)  Never the less, I'm excited about it and I feel compelled to describe each forthcoming piece. I want to give them their own space, so each one will get its own blog post, starting with Maharaja:

The MENC has dictated in its National Standards that young musicians should be exposed to music of international origin, in order to foster an understanding of foreign cultures through their art.  This has not been difficult, because folksong arrangements from Japan, Latin America, Australia, and all over Europe are readily available and quite popular.  The exception: India.  There are no "Indian" songs available to string orchestras.  Traditional Indian music defies simplification and arrangement because it:

1. is a mostly improvisational musical genre.
2. doesn't really have "melodies" in the Western sense
3. utilizes sounds that are nearly impossible to replicate with Western instruments.

It's a challenge, to say the least, but one I was up for.  I decided that the key was not to approach Indian music from a "classical" perspective with all its confusing ragas and improvised noodlings, but instead, to approach it from a pop music perspective.  The "Bollywood" style uses Western tonality, forms, and  instrumentation but with a distinctive South-Asian flair and often the addition of tabla drums and sitars.  It's a fascinating blend of Indian and Western pop styles.  And that would be my starting point.

When writing my new, forthcoming piece, Maharaja, I started as I always do: with meticulous research.  I listened to countless songs and watched videos on YouTube to get an understanding of Bollywood style - its conventions, typical rhythms, melodic style, forms, and use of instrumentation.  The piece is based it on the "Asian" scale with flat third and sixth degrees and sharp fourth degrees.  I made sure to use idiomatic flourishes and syncopations, octave interjections in the violins, and even approximated the sound of tabla drums with slurred pizzicato in the 'cellos and basses.  Bollywood music is typically very rhythmic and, in lieu of using a drum kit, I opted for finger snaps.

Honestly, I submitted Maharaja with little hope of it being selected for publication but, once again, the selection committee surprised me.  I'm very glad they did, not only because I poured a lot of time and love into its creation, but because Indian music has a close plase in my heart.  As a small child my family lived in Sri Lanka, just off the coast of India and my parents lived in India before that. The two countries have somewhat similar cultures and musical traditions. I grew up surrounded by wicker, brass, Sri Lankan and Indian artifacts, and stories of the Para Hara.  My childhood nickname was that of a bell-shaped Buddhist shrine.  Long story short: I've always had an affinity for South Asian culture and I'm thrilled that I can share that interest with orchestra students of the world.

Bollywood

I've been continuing my ongoing effort to write unique music for students and expose them to styles and forms that that have been unexplored in the string orchestra canon. So I got out my atlas and looked around. There are plenty of arrangements of North American folk tunes out there as well as Latin dances. The musical styles of every European nation have been represented and Chinese and Japanese tunes have been done. There are still lots of options, but the one major culture that hasn't been represented is India.

This is probably due to the fact that Indian raga music doesn't translate easily to a Western format. It's percussive, improvisational, through-composed, and the sounds are distinctive and hard to approximate with Western instruments. India doesn't have "folk songs" in quite the same way that we do. It's a challenge, but I've found that the way around it is to meet Indian music half way - not to imitate traditional Indian music, but to write a Bollywood-style piece.

Bollywood (the Indian film industry, which puts out mostly musicals) has a style all its own, using distinctly Indian elements in a Western format. The melodies usually use the "asian" scale and are highly melismatic, but stay in strict rhythm and take the verse-chorus-verse-chorus forms of Western pop songs. They tend to use tabla drums and sitars, but often incorporate keyboard, guitars, and techno beats. They are a form of popular music, after all.

So, after a lot of research on YouTube and several weeks of false starts and experimentation, I've come up with an Indian-sounding piece that's approachable for advanced orchestras. I should be able to finish it early next week.